JERUSALEM — Bastet, a vegan and LGBT-friendly cafe whose blue tables spill across a central Jerusalem sidewalk, is a secular oasis for residents seeking Saturday refreshment in a city that largely comes to a standstill for the Jewish Sabbath.
But each week, a procession of ultra-Orthodox men, some in their finest fur hats and gold robes, invariably marches past in a show of displeasure at the cafe’s desecration of the day of rest. “Shabbos!” they chant, using the Yiddish word for the Sabbath.
On a recent Saturday, the wait staff struck back, lifting their shirts to reveal their bras in an attempt to push back the religiously conservative demonstrators.
The confrontation reflected a central tension in modern Israel over the very nature of the state, founded by secular Zionists but with an ultrareligious population that is growing in size and influence.
That tension came to the forefront late last month, thwarting longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to form a new government and sending a stunned nation to the polls for the second time this year. Netanyahu needed two competing factions, secular and religious, to form a governing majority in parliament, and they were deadlocked over legislation that proposes drafting the ultra-Orthodox into the military as other Israeli Jews are.
The ultrareligious parties oppose conscription as an attempt to assimilate their cloistered communities by thrusting their young men into contact with secular life and values.
But Avigdor Liberman, Israel’s ultranationalist former defense minister, has made resistance to ultra-Orthodox influence an essential part of his appeal to his political base of secular Russian-speaking immigrants. Those close to him say the conscription issue is part of his wider concern about a minority community that receives state welfare payments and tax breaks while contributing less than other Israeli taxpayers.
The ultra-Orthodox, a catchall for a religious community that includes a wide range of sects, choose largely to segregate themselves from the wider Israeli society to lead a life in which religious observance is paramount. Outside influences, such as films, the internet and mixing with secular Israelis is discouraged, if not forbidden.
But in Israel’s fragmented parliamentary democracy, the political parties representing the ultra-Orthodox have become kingmakers in recent years, elevating their agenda and carving a fault line in Israeli society that is expected to grow.
For Israelis like Klil Lifshitz, the 28-year-old lesbian who opened Bastet 2 1/2 years ago with a “super feminist” wait staff rather than decamp to liberal Tel Aviv as most of her friends had, the shrinking space for secularism is a concern.
“They have more and more power,” she said of the ultra-Orthodox. “As long as they keep having the power they do in forming coalitions and governments, they are basically going to get what they want.”
It was during an unusually large demonstration last month, called by ultra-Orthodox Jews to protest what they termed Israel’s desecration of the Sabbath as the country hosted the Eurovision song contest, that the wait staff decided to make their own stand. They said the purpose was to protect their tables and make an ideological point.
Since then the ultra-Orthodox have paused their weekly walk past.
“It is a victory,” said Mira Ibrahim, one of the staff who decided to disrobe, though she said the sense of triumph was tinged by a heavy-handed police response to the demonstrators that made the staff uncomfortable.
Wider battle
But while the Bastet staff may have won a small reprieve, the wider battle is only expected to escalate. The ultra-Orthodox, also known as Haredim, make up only 12 percent of the population but are the fastest-growing segment of Israelis, with women giving birth to an average of 6.9 children.
In the early days of the Israeli state, many of the ultra-Orthodox were opposed to the secular Zionist movement that created it, fearing it would eradicate their form of Judaism. Now, they are increasing their power in Israel’s 120-member parliament, where they most recently won 16 seats, to promote and protect their interests, rather than shunning it.
And it’s not just the ultra-Orthodox who are pushing for Israel to be ruled by religious law. On Monday, Netanyahu rejected calls from his political ally Bezalel Smotrich, a religious — but not ultra-Orthodox — Jew, for the Israeli justice system to adhere to Jewish law.
“Israel will not be a halacha state,” Netanyahu tweeted, using the term for Jewish law based on the Talmud.
A religious state is what Avraham Menkes, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, would like to see, and he sees conscription as a threat to the existence of his unique community. National service, he says, is a “melting pot” designed to take Israeli Jewish immigrants from a diverse mix of cultures across the world, and give them a uniform identity.
Menkes heads the Committee to Save the Torah World, a group that leads protests against efforts to draft his community members. He’s been jailed 10 times for his activism. On the wall of his Jerusalem apartment hangs a picture of a protest two years ago. A group of demonstrators sit huddled in the streets with their backs to the spray of a police water cannon.
“I’m in there somewhere,” he said.
The issue of conscription came to the forefront in 2017, when Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that exemptions from military service for the ultra-Orthodox were unlawful and asked the Knesset to draft a new, more equal law. (Most Jewish men in Israel are required to serve nearly three years, and Jewish women for two.)
Military exemptions for the Haredim have been around since the birth of Israel. In 1949, the country’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, granted them for 400 religious yeshiva students, because so many Jewish scholars had died in the Holocaust. Since then, numbers have ballooned.
The conscription issue has stoked the ire of many in the wider population who do not see these religious Jews as paying their way. Employment among ultra-Orthodox men is only about 50 percent; many prefer religious study. The government supports them with tax breaks and large welfare payments.
“Israelis who serve in the army and work hard for a living say they are parasites and live off the money they get from the government, and it’s our taxes being used for that,” said Carlo Strenger, a professor of philosophy and psychology at Tel Aviv University who has warned that Israel is being torn apart by such fear and resentment. He argues that a federative structure, which gives both the ultra-Orthodox and Israel’s Arab citizens a way to live without feeling imperiled, may be the answer.
